Everyone knows that to summon Betelgeuse – the undead prankster from Tim Burton’s zanily macabre 1988 breakthrough – you simply have to say his name three times aloud. This belated follow-up left me wondering how many times you’d have to say it to make him go away for good.
The messy and tiresome Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which opened the Venice Film Festival this evening, is the latest of Hollywood’s ‘legacy sequels’ – essentially, veiled remakes of hits from a generation ago, disguised as bonus chapters. A handful of these (Blade Runner 2049, Top Gun: Maverick, Twisters) have managed to match and even surpass their forebears, usually by embracing their unavoidable times-have-changed subtext. But the rest have been little more than bonbon-dangling nostalgia bait, and Burton’s film falls depressingly into the second group.
The first Beetlejuice boasted a premise as intriguing as it was simple. What if the ghosts in a haunted house wanted to get rid of its new living residents? (Answer: they call in Michael Keaton, as the underworld’s preeminent bio-exorcist.) The new one, scripted by Alfred Gough and Miles Miller, instead haphazardly bolts together a series of half-formed ideas, each designed to heave one of the original’s wheels back into service.
So mother and daughter Delia and Lydia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara and Winona Ryder, neither wildly enthused) return to their once-haunted Connecticut homestead, following the grisly death of father Charles in a plane crash-stroke-shark attack. (The actor who played him, Jeffrey Jones, is now a registered sex offender: no comeback for him, though his character is resurrected in a stop-motion flashback, as well as in photographs and as a chomped-through prosthetic.) And Lydia’s worldly wise teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) strikes up a romance with an innocent-seeming local lad (Arthur Conti): a storyline resolved in such a witlessly perfunctory way I found myself waiting for a twist that never arrived.
Meanwhile in the afterlife, Betelgeuse’s vengeful ex-wife, played by Monica Bellucci, is, I think, trying to do away him once and for all – though she’s so seldom on screen, it’s hard to work out what she’s up to, beyond serving as a mechanism for hurrying along the plot. (Willem Dafoe has fun as the undead police chief – or rather undead actor lost in the role of police chief – on her tail.)